NEW YORK, January 7, 2026, 08:05 EST
- Sandisk jumped 27.6% on Tuesday, leading a sharp rally in U.S. memory and storage shares.
- Investors latched onto comments at CES that highlighted storage as a growing bottleneck for AI.
- Analysts flagged rising memory prices and tight supply ahead of Sandisk’s Jan. 29 results.
Sandisk shares jumped 27.6% on Tuesday to $349.63, extending a breakneck run for the flash-memory maker as investors poured back into the data storage trade. Western Digital rose 16.8%, Seagate Technology climbed 14.0% and Micron Technology gained 10.0%.
The rally matters because it widens the artificial intelligence bet beyond chip designers to the companies that store and shuttle the data that powers AI systems. Sandisk has risen more than 40% in the first three trading sessions of 2026, as traders position for signs that tight supply is turning into stronger pricing power across the sector. 1
At CES in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed storage as a looming constraint, while Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan argued spending is shifting from training AI models toward “AI Inference” — running trained models to produce answers in real time. “As we look at 2026 and beyond, we expect AI Inference to dominate,” Mohan wrote, as companies retain more data for analytics and compliance and push “edge AI” onto devices such as vehicles and drones. 2
Supply signals have reinforced the move. Industry data cited by Moneycontrol showed NAND — the flash memory used in solid-state drives — has tightened, with wafer prices jumping 60% in November and contract prices roughly doubling since July, while suppliers are sold out through 2026 and are already discussing 2027 allocations. “For storage, that is a completely unserved market today,” Huang said, and Moneycontrol also reported Sandisk has gained two percentage points of NAND market share over the past 12 months. 3
Sandisk has also tried to sharpen its message to consumers and developers at CES, unveiling the SANDISK Optimus brand for internal SSDs and retiring the WD_BLACK and WD Blue names it inherited from Western Digital. “The SANDISK Optimus brand redefines what performance means for consumer needs,” said Heidi Arkinstall, Sandisk’s vice president of global consumer brand and digital marketing. 4
The company has been rebuilding its identity since it split from Western Digital and began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SNDK in February 2025. “We are excited to embark on this new chapter for Sandisk,” CEO David Goeckeler said at the time, pitching the standalone company as a flash-memory specialist aimed at both consumer devices and enterprise data centers. 5
Investors now look to Sandisk’s Jan. 29 earnings update for read-through on enterprise SSD pricing and how it plans to balance growth spending with capital discipline, Simply Wall St said. It pointed to board and audit-committee changes as a governance positive, but noted Sandisk is still working its way back to consistent profitability. 6
